Latest Populus and YouGov figures
Today's Populus and YouGov polls both have six point leads for Labour. Populus's topline figures in their twice weekly poll are CON 32%, LAB 38%, LDEM 9%, UKIP 14% (tabs are here). The daily YouGov poll for the Sun this morning has topline figures of CON 33%, LAB 39%, LDEM 9%, UKIP 12% (tabs are here.)
As you'll probably know, the Wythenshawe and Sale East by-election was also last night, and was a comfortable Labour hold. This means today will be full of people saying what it *means* and trying to draw some wider conclusions based upon it. I'll only repeat my normal warning about not reading too much into by-elections. They are extremely unusual beasts - an election in just one single seat that won't be representative of the whole country, intensely fought but often with low turnout, and where who wins does not make any difference to who the government is the next day. Essentially, if a by-election performs in line with the national polls it doesn't tell us anything we didn't already know, if it performs in some way different to the polls it's probably because of the unusual circumstances implicit in a by-election.
That doesn't mean they don't have a big impact on politics of course. If UKIP had done much better it would have given them a big publicity boost and probably set off a narrative about them threatening Labour seats... but they didn't.
